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Bob et all:
> Free and open communication available to billions of people is just not
> something our laws and societies are evolved to deal with. Right now we
> are trying very hard to jam it into the private property can. Some of
> it, who knows how much, may not fit in there.
I recollect that this thread started by almost everybody's displeasure
with the appropriation of knowledge existing among many developers. Then,
in the last writings, most of the authors except Bob quoted above start by
(at least patially) assuming that ownership of ideas is the *normal* state
of life and all we have to do is prevent bad guys from stealing our
property. Citation is part of the same attitude but it comes from the
ancient world where books were rare and having them was a luxury worth
mentioning. Note even then ideas were spread beyound the written book.
Let's look at this: information is the one asset that is not lost to the
originator when shared but if you share it, chances are you get more in
exchange [this idea originates from an article not anymore available
online so I cannot quote it but a similar one is found in John Perry
Barlowe "Selling wine without bottles: the economy of conciousness in the
Web" on http://underpear.gyuvetch.bg/translat/barlow.htm - follow the link
to see the use of citations :-)].
The web is a place of visibility and sharing that finally makes knowledge
without limits happen. Myself use open source programs when I need them,
and write their developers all over the world for help while deploying
them. Can we express such exchange in the terms of owing something? They
owe (and share) the software, I owe the questions but who owes the
knowledge created during the exchange between us - or on this multiauthor
list, for that matter? Tracing collective knowledge's authoring sounds to
me like the good scientific tradition to cut the animal to see how it
functioned while it used to be alive. We should rather strive to
accommodate life (and law) to this phenomenon instead.
BTW, the uniqueness of the Web was predicted by Herman Hesse around 1920
in his book "The glass pearls game". No computers there but the glass
pearls game is the collective synthesis of knowledge as its uppermost
form.
Kremena
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